The UK Soaps That Never Happened

Carrie Fairchild

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Elsewhere on the forum, we’ve looked at the US primetime and daytime soaps that didn’t get off the ground, so I thought it would be fun to look at some of the UK soaps that suffered a similar fate. I’ve a few that come to mind but please add in any that you know of, as I always enjoy reading tidbits about soaps that I haven’t heard of.

Late 00’s ITV soap spinoffs: I think I’ve discussed these before although there’s nothing about them online (I remember reading about these on Teletext). When ITV were proposing to launch a new daytime soap in 2007/08, they looked to their primetime dramas for potential spinoffs. There was talk of an Emmerdale spinoff set in a vets practice, a Coronation Street spinoff set in Weatherfield police station and a The Bill spinoff set in the local hospital (Sun Hill General). In the end, they went with The Royal Today, a present day spinoff of their Sunday night period drama The Royal.

Also on ITV, after losing Home & Away to Channel 5 in 2000, the network put a call out for a replacement teen soap. In the hunt for one, they ended up with two - the revived Crossroads and the surreal soap Night and Day (originally titled Life Etc. then Trafalgar Road). However, there were a handful of other soaps that were pitched, which made it down to the final few.

Richfield: glossy soap set in London from the production company behind Sky’s football soap Dream Team. I remember it being described as a British take on Beverly Hills 90210.

Big Smoke: Jonathan Harvey (Beautiful Thing, Gimme Gimme Gimme, Corrie) penned soap set in a block of flats.

Hope Point: gritty author Kevin Sampson (Powder) was paired with Corrie & Hollyoaks writers for this soap about modern families.

Big City: another London based soap, this time set in a run down boarding house on the fictional Hansford Road, NW1, where the young residents culture clash with the more settled families of the area. Produced by Shed Productions, who at the time were best known for Bad Girls, the creative team included Corrie’s infamous “mad axeman” Brian Park (who was also responsible for blowing up the Hart clan in Family Affairs) and Ann McManus & Maureen Chadwick, who would later create Footballers Wives and Waterloo Road.

The Family: Phillip Bowman (Aussie producer responsible for bringing Nicola Freeman into Crossroads) originated this idea about a soldier who was leading a double life between his family back home in Australia and the family he started while serving in Vietnam. While based in the UK, Bowman realised the potential of reworking the idea and setting the show between UK/Australia instead. Brookside producer Phil Redmond came on board and they pitched it to Granada, as a potential entry into a daytime soap race that ITV were opening at the time….

Ocean View: …. with Granada seemingly losing interest in The Family, Redmond was approached by TVS about pitching a show on their behalf for the aforementioned daytime soap competition. Ocean View was to be escapist fare, described as “Brookie-on-Sea” it would be set in a marina village on the sunny South Coast.

As Redmond tells it, while at an industry event, he ran into the Granada exec he’d pitched the supposedly long forgotten The Family to, who asked “how’s our show coming along?”. Confused and presuming he was asking about TVS’s Ocean View, Redmond asked if he was speaking in reference to the ITV network as a whole. The exec doubled down, confirming that he was talking about “our show with the Australians in it” that he’d just OK’d the finances for. It transpired that Granada were pitching an Aussie/UK show after all, it just wasn’t the one that Redmond had come to them with although it was extremely similar. And to add to the drama, when it came down to the final two shows being considered, Redmond’s Ocean View was facing off against Granada’s Families, which would eventually run for three years from 1990 - 1993.

Saxon House: created by Russell T Davies and Paul Marquess, this was to be a daytime soap set in the 1800’s.
 

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TVS were in financial dire straits around the time they pitched Ocean View (1989\1990), due to the MTM acquisition.

The acquisition of MTM played a factor in their demise. (They pitched a higher bid in the franchise auction, but the ITC weren't sure they would be able to pay nearly £60 million pounds a year, given their financial problems)
 
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Carrie Fairchild

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Saxon House: created by Russell T Davies and Paul Marquess, this was to be a daytime soap set in the 1800’s.
Another couple of proposed Russell T Davies Granada soaps that I’ve gleaned from a run down of work that he talked about on his Instagram a few years back.

Toast: another collaboration with Paul Marquess, this soap would follow the lives and loves of the B&B landladies of Blackpool.

Mario’s: Corrie spinoff that would’ve run five days a week at 5.30pm. After inheriting money, Kevin & Sally Webster would move south and open a garage, where their neighbours included a boozy, negligee clad housewife, a Mrs Mangel type character and an Italian family who ran the titular Mario’s Pizzeria. Davies spent six months developing the idea with veteran Aussie writer Patrea Smallacombe, who’d worked on everything from Corrie to Prisoner to A Country Practice. They wrote twelve scripts (in which Kevin & Sally were called Paul & Linda, in order to keep the spinoff a secret) but the show was never picked up.
 

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Another couple of proposed Russell T Davies Granada soaps that I’ve gleaned from a run down of work that he talked about on his Instagram a few years back.

Toast: another collaboration with Paul Marquess, this soap would follow the lives and loves of the B&B landladies of Blackpool.

Mario’s: Corrie spinoff that would’ve run five days a week at 5.30pm. After inheriting money, Kevin & Sally Webster would move south and open a garage, where their neighbours included a boozy, negligee clad housewife, a Mrs Mangel type character and an Italian family who ran the titular Mario’s Pizzeria. Davies spent six months developing the idea with veteran Aussie writer Patrea Smallacombe, who’d worked on everything from Corrie to Prisoner to A Country Practice. They wrote twelve scripts (in which Kevin & Sally were called Paul & Linda, in order to keep the spinoff a secret) but the show was never picked up.
Depending on when he created it, Mario's would have stood no chance in that timeslot as Neighbours dominated the 5.30pm slot. (ITV moved the revived Crossroads to that slot after cutting it to 4 days a week)
 

Carrie Fairchild

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Westbeach: technically, this one did happen albeit not in the soap format it was originally pitched for. In the early 90’s, BBC1 were looking for a thrice weekly soap to replace Wogan and lead their evening schedules into battle with ITV. Westbeach was one of the shows in the running, the tale of two rival families in a fictional English seaside town, they were pipped at the post by the sunnier seashores of Eldorado. The idea was reworked, showing up as a ten part hourlong drama on the Saturday night schedules in 1993.
 

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Westbeach: technically, this one did happen albeit not in the soap format it was originally pitched for. In the early 90’s, BBC1 were looking for a thrice weekly soap to replace Wogan and lead their evening schedules into battle with ITV. Westbeach was one of the shows in the running, the tale of two rival families in a fictional English seaside town, they were pipped at the post by the sunnier seashores of Eldorado. The idea was reworked, showing up as a ten part hourlong drama on the Saturday night schedules in 1993.
Westbeach to add came from Allan McKeown's production company WitzEnd, and Eldorado from Verity Lambert's company. (The BBC insisted on independent producers rather than make it in house)
 

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It had Birds of A Feather (another production involving Allan McKeown) as it’s lead-in.
Yep it did. (Allan also executive produced the short lived American version of BOAF, which explains why Sam McMurray was cast as the latter had worked with Tracey Ullman).

WitzEnd (through it's parent company SelecTV) were part of the Meridian consortium that bid for the franchise TVS had, which they won.

(Allan McKeown when submitting the application pitched a special which featured his wife Tracey Ullman, which became A Class Act, her return to TV since her Fox sketch show which famously gave us The Simpsons).
 

Carrie Fairchild

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Misfits: yet another from the Russell T Davies archive of unmade soaps. This was a proposed spinoff of Queer As Folk, envisaged as a late night soap that would follow the waifs and strays that lived in Hazel’s (Denise Black) boarding house. QAF characters Alexander (Anthony Cotton), Bernie (Andy Devine), Donna (Carla Henry) & the briefly seen Des, would all star, in addition to a guest stint from Vince (Craig Kelly) in the first four episodes, alongside new characters including Des’ son Mickey, a gay doctor. Plans were at an advanced stage, with Davies outlining the first 22 episodes and scripts being written for a number of them. Just as a production office was about to open, Channel 4 lost interest and pulled the plug on the idea.
 

ArchieLucasCarringtonEwing1989

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Not sure where I read this but apparently they planned on creating a Emmerdale spinoff with Rachel Hughes and Elsa Feldman being the central characters, it would have focused on Rachel’s life at Leeds uni and Elsa life as a career woman in Leeds, there would have been guest appearances by Mark Hughes, Michael Feldman, Nick Bates, Joe Sugden and Kathy Bates, but most of the characters would have been Rachel’s uni friends and Elsa’s work colleagues, as the two young women would have shared a flat
 

Carrie Fairchild

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Not sure where I read this but apparently they planned on creating a Emmerdale spinoff with Rachel Hughes and Elsa Feldman being the central characters, it would have focused on Rachel’s life at Leeds uni and Elsa life as a career woman in Leeds, there would have been guest appearances by Mark Hughes, Michael Feldman, Nick Bates, Joe Sugden and Kathy Bates, but most of the characters would have been Rachel’s uni friends and Elsa’s work colleagues, as the two young women would have shared a flat
This rings a bell. I may have read it on here. It’s curious as, based on my limited knowledge of Emmerdale, I think that the period when this may have been pitched (1991 is when Rachel attended college in Leeds according to the Emmerdale wiki) was when the show was struggling in the ratings. A random offshoot set in Leeds doesn’t sound like something that would be a priority when the parent show was trying to stay afloat but they were obviously throwing ideas around. Of course, all ratings woes and creative concerns would be resolved a couple of years later when they dropped the airplane on the village.

Another ITV one that I’ve remembered from the 90’s is a spinoff from Corrie focusing on Bet. I think it may just have been tabloid talk at the time but Bet’s Bar was reportedly going to follow Bet after she left the Street in 1995, as she opened a new bar elsewhere (possibly in Spain). Given that Julie Goodyear left the show to pursue other projects (including the failed talk show pilot and film that didn’t transpire), I can’t imagine that she would have jumped straight back into another Bet project so soon. Again, this may just have been rumoured at the time but I’m pretty sure I read it either in a tabloid or on the Teletext TV pages.
 

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This rings a bell. I may have read it on here. It’s curious as, based on my limited knowledge of Emmerdale, I think that the period when this may have been pitched (1991 is when Rachel attended college in Leeds according to the Emmerdale wiki) was when the show was struggling in the ratings. A random offshoot set in Leeds doesn’t sound like something that would be a priority when the parent show was trying to stay afloat but they were obviously throwing ideas around. Of course, all ratings woes and creative concerns would be resolved a couple of years later when they dropped the airplane on the village.

Another ITV one that I’ve remembered from the 90’s is a spinoff from Corrie focusing on Bet. I think it may just have been tabloid talk at the time but Bet’s Bar was reportedly going to follow Bet after she left the Street in 1995, as she opened a new bar elsewhere (possibly in Spain). Given that Julie Goodyear left the show to pursue other projects (including the failed talk show pilot and film that didn’t transpire), I can’t imagine that she would have jumped straight back into another Bet project so soon. Again, this may just have been rumoured at the time but I’m pretty sure I read it either in a tabloid or on the Teletext TV pages.
The film you mention had a working title of Girls Night Out, and Julie was to have played one of the main roles.

Down the line, Granada weren't sure about Julie Goodyear in a lead role and so Julie Walters got cast instead alongside Brenda Blethyn, with the film now called Girls Night.

It was to have been originally produced and aired as a TV movie on ITV, but got a positive critical reaction at the Sundance Festival in the US it was given a cinema release instead before being shown on TV.
 
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